New and assuredly thorough research from Melbourne's Brotherhood of St. Laurence charity suggests that a lot of people are starting to consider those anxious moments before their 30th birthdays the threshold to adulthood, rather than those ecstatic moments before their 21st birthdays.

A survey of people born in a Melbourne suburb back in 1990 found that only 38 percent of respondents felt they had reached full, bill-paying, tire-changing, no-longer-eating-Lucky-Charms-for-dinner adulthood. 21 percent were pretty insistent that they were not adults, that is, until they looked down at their balled up fists and whispered mournfully, "Whose hands are these?" An indecisive 49 percent couldn't say for sure whether or not they considered themselves mature adults, and so promptly went back to rediscovering old Nintendo 64 games from their youth. 72 percent of the 140 people in the survey, regardless of what they thought about their entry or non-entry into adulthood, were still living at home.

All this reliable data has prompted researchers to proclaim that 30 is the new 21, that people are maturing at a slower rate either because they are living longer or just don't give a fuck about trying to be financially independent. Which brings up an important point — financial independence isn't the only yardstick of maturity, nor is a sampling of suburbanites in an industrialized "Western" country any way to determine that young adults are maturing at slower rates. A kid who grows up in the Sudan, ice-fishing around the Arctic circle or pickpocketing in the streets of London with a band of orphaned hooligans, for instance, might see some shit that would age a person pretty quickly, so this research seems like it has little credence beyond certain cultures.